Posts Tagged ‘Links’

I’ve been doing this a long time, but even though it’s been nearly ten years (or longer, depending if I count pre-North stuff), there isn’t really as much content as you’d think there’d be. Maybe because I spread stuff out so much. Or because I concentrated on other sites. Or because, frankly, I don’t have a lot to say.

Anyway, it makes picking my favourite posts pretty easy.

Over the years, I’ve had a couple of posts get big traffic. The first was a MVP column I wrote that somehow found it’s way into a Ball Don’t Lie link-post, which gave me literally thousands of pageviews. The second is a post I don’t even remember writing, where I picked apart some hack’s column for some reason. It’s not something I’d do now; it seems kind of petty and mean as I read it now. I’m not going to link to either here.

Instead, I’m going to focus on stuff I’m glad I wrote, posts that still hold up. I think all blogging is a transitory medium – even the best stuff is meaningless the next day – so apologies for linking material that’s dated, stale and otherwise out-of-context. I still like these ten posts anyway.

An early stab at reporting, from my pre J-School days, when I didn’t know how to put together a feature and my big inspirations were Hunter Thompson and Dr. Z. It’s a mess, but I can see something forming here: a little media criticism, some first-hand observations, and for some reason, a mention of violence in the city. It’s a mess, but it’s the only thing I wrote in the early years I’d still read. Even if it’s super derivative:

By the end of the Third Quarter the outcome of the game was sadly apparent – Montreal possessed the lead as Toronto fumbled or was intercepted seemingly every time they had the ball. Just down a few rows from me sat two lonely Montreal fans, cheering and screaming wildly whenever their team did something, from scoring to making a tackle to calling a timeout. The other people in my section would scream and throw food at them, but their spirits never dampened, they were the winners here and they knew it…

“Did…Did you not see the game? (Maniacal Laughter)” – Montreal fan, replying to slanderous insults

I’d still watch any of these five films, you know: the 1987 World Juniors, the time the power went out during a Cup Final game, the 1993 playoffs, the closing of the Montreal Forum and the 1987 Canada Cup. And since then, they’ve released, what, one hockey movie?

I don’t really remember the context here – I guess McCown said something stupid, as is his wont – but this was one of the first times I delved into the gender divide and it’s a topic I’ve written about a few other times. The particular story’s dated, but my attitude is the same:

It’s different than just watching the odd WNBA game and making cracks about how they can’t dunk. When you’re there all the time, one realizes there isn’t as much a difference between men’s and women’s sports. Talented athletes will excel at their sport regardless of gender. Yes, the WNBA only recently had it’s first dunk, but that’s doesn’t make it a lesser league, only a different one.

Conversely, when a popular website publishes a clickbaity piece by one of Canada’s most annoying writers, you’d better believe I’ll rip into it:

After all, it’s horrors beyond horrors that Toronto hasn’t won anything since 1993 (unless you count the Argos, which Marche doesn’t do until it suits his hypotheses). I wake up in the middle of the night with a jolt, sweat-drenched, angry beyond words about Tie Domi on a semi-regular basis. But it also isn’t that big of a deal: so what if the Leafs lose every year. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908 and life has gone on there ever since. The Jays lost tonight. C’est la vie.

Even in a lost year, I found some things about the Jays season to remember, which is kind of what I try to here: even if Toronto sports can get negative really quick, there’s always lots of fun things to remember. Like Rajai Davis making a killer grab at the wall. Accentuate the positive, as NRBQ used to sing.

Over at The Good Point, I’ve got a piece I’m pretty happy with, where I examine why more mainstream sports outlets – Sports Illustrated, ESPN, etc – don’t cover women’s sports like they do men’s.

In it, I spoke to a woman who runs a great site, The Scoreboard for Equality. There, she keeps an eye on the NY Times and other sites. As I wrote in my story:

A sample day: on July 12, the New York Times had 25 stories about men’s sports and just one about women’s: a lone story about golf in China. The night before, there were two WNBA games and a NWSL match between Seattle and Western New York. ESPN premiered the first of it’s Nine for IX documentary series just a couple days later. As per the report on Scoreboard, none of those events were on the publication’s main sports page.

Perhaps you’ve heard the Times famed motto: All the News That’s Fit To Print.

I don’t know if there’s any writing more disposable than sportswriting. Maybe grocery lists. Certainly posts like this. The best sportswriting is timeless: nobody’s ever going to forget about Pat Jordan, Red Smith or WC Heinz, let alone pieces like Norman Mailer’s report in the Ali/Frazier fight. But mostly, it’s uneventful stuff. “Then the Habs scored two quick ones, bang, bang, and it was 3-2 for the good guys,” that kind of thing. Most sportswriting is on deadline and is dated by the next day. It’s not meant to be read a week later.

That said, what I do is less reporting and more blogging. My title’s Contributor and I almost never get press credentials, although I don’t apply for many to begin with. And I’ve been lucky enough to bang out words on a weekly (and more usually, biweekly) basis for The Good Point, so there’s a little more latitude when it comes to writing. So instead of covering things, I usually write about whatever’s been happening in the world of sports and react to them. On a bad day, I’m not any more interesting than a hack columnist on some small town newspaper, offering uninteresting and instantly dated opinions (see: this column about the NHL coming to Markham). I feel for editor and general behind the scenes wizard Rob Boudreau, who deals with me every two weeks. He’s probably my most regular reader.

But on a good day, I’d like to think I’m able to shine a little light into some of the more offbeat corners of sports. Over the four years I’ve been writing at The Good Point, I’ve covered a huge range of topics, including some I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone else write about; I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of wider interests than the average sports-scribbler or on my complete inability to function as a journalist.

I recently filed my 100th post for The Good Point. I have no idea how I got to this number, I never thought I’d be there for a full year (then again, I always thought I’d be a beat writer of some sort by now). What follows is a few links to some of my favourite posts and a few words on each.

When I think about Stern, I think about him at the draft last June and how a rowdy crowd booed him constantly. Is he the most unlikeable commissioner in sports? He’s certainly more popular than Gary Bettman. And he’s actually more than a little likable; when he was booed, he held his hand up to his ear, feeding off it like the heel in a pro wrestling show.

What will his legacy be? That’s a tough, large and ill-defined question. Instead we should look at what he’s done: he was in charge just as the league started to blossom in popularity, brought in changes that helped make the sport more fun for the casual fan and been there as the NBA became a global league.

Think back to 1972 for a second: Young had just scored a number one hit with Heart of Gold. When people went out to see Young, they were expecting something like that. They got something else entirely instead: a hard rocking band, with Young screeching on a Flying V which barely stayed in tune. They didn’t get the gentle country from Harvest, they didn’t even get the jamming rock of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. They got something else entirely: loud, dissonant downright punkish country-rock. And goddamn, is it good.

(P)resent, though, was the emotional center of this band: Napoleon Murphy Brock and George Duke. Brock played sax, Duke played keyboards and they both spent a lot of time at the mic, goofing off and jamming. When Zappa fans say this was their favorite band, they usually mean these two: Duke’s funky keyboards gave Zappa’s band a sound it’d never had before (or ever would again, really) while Brock’s sense of humor and personality shine through, even decades later. He’d never quite get this same chemistry on stage again. This was a funny band but it could play its pants off too. To paraphrase band percussionist Ruth Underwood, Zappa thought this band could conquer the world.

On the surface, “Levels of the Game” is a compact, powerful profile of two tennis players: Clark Graebner, a conservative white player from Ohio, and Arthur Ashe, a liberal black man from the south. Their styles of play reflect their personalities. Graebner plays the odds, a grinding, powerful style of tennis, heavy on driving the ball past the opponent. But Ashe plays risker, gambling on big shots and hits with a powerful backhand. On a deeper level, these two are the faces of America as the 1960s ended and the sporting culture began to shift.

Plus, I’ve been contributing to a few other places and done a few smaller features for Flashfact and The Ogopogan, including a movie review, a story about the rejected BCE/Astral Media merger and some stuff on Quebec politics. For full updates, keep an eye on my twitter account!

I was watching some older NBA stuff the other day when I realized it’s been 10 full seasons now since the NBA ended it’s run on NBC. It’s kind of a strange period: everybody looks back fondly at the NBA on NBC while barely caring about any other old broadcast: who pines for the days when Brent Musburger called games on CBS or for Chris Schenkel’s bowling stuff? Probably has something to do with a certain couple personalities.

From my essay:

There were many things to love about the NBA on NBC: the Jordan Dynasty with his six titles; the Kobe and Shaq Lakers winning multiple championships; the iconic theme song. But another was how wide-ranging its broadcasts seemed: I remember when the Raptors played on a national game. And I remember when they aired two, sometimes three games on single day.